How to Prepare Images for Web Use

Images matter. In fact, that’s an understatement. Images and visual content in general lie at the heart of a website. No matter if you have a photography or food blog, an e-commerce store or an informative type of website, it’s fundamental to know how to optimize your photos. This can truly make a difference between a quality and a poor website incapable of retaining visitors.

Image optimization is a complex process, which involves a series of steps. It’s about decreasing the size of your files and hence making your pages load faster. It’s about retouching in order to create sharp, professional-looking photos. It’s about protecting your images from online theft and choosing the right format. Last, but not least this essential process regards improving your SEO for images, since we all aspire after a higher ranking in the search engines.

In order to optimize your pictures you could resort to Photoshop, but the software is rather complex and definitely comes with a hefty price tag. At the same you could opt for a batch photo editing tool that can meet all of your image optimization needs, is considerably easier to use and is also budget-friendly, such as our app BatchPhoto.

Reduce Image File Size

Have you ever browsed a web page you were interested in that took forever to load? Unfortunately this is a common scenario for many internet users, and one of the reasons why this happens is directly linked with unoptimized, high-resolution images.

Large photos can have a severe impact on your website’s loading speed. A poor loading speed is equivalent to a poor user experience. Following this train of thought, a poor user experience will inevitably reflect on your search engine rankings, which is the last thing you want. This is why it’s essential to reduce the size of your photos.

Using a tool like BatchPhoto means you get to accomplish the task easily and efficiently, since it’s designed to resize images in bulk. Basically, all you have to do is add all your images and enter the desired dimensions for the width and height, in either pixels or percentage. For example, if you’re pictures have a width of 4695 pixels, it’s advisable to resize them to a width of 1920 or 1280 pixels for optimal results. Just make sure that the “Maintain aspect ratio” box is checked, so that the pictures don’t get distorted.

Crop Photos Automatically

There are times when cropping can be an important part of the optimization process, since it’s an operation that enables you to improve the overall composition of a photo, as well as remove undesired parts that can divert the attention from the main subject.

If you need to crop your images in the same manner, BatchPhoto is the right tool because it can automate the process and help you save precious time. The app places at your disposal two ways to crop your pictures:

Auto Crop. This features enables you to automatically crop pictures to a predefined aspect ratio, such as 16:9, 4:3 or perhaps 1:1, or to a different aspect ratio defined by you personally.

Crop. This feature lets you step in and manually cut out the unwanted elements from the pictures. You can easily do it by using drag and drop or by entering the new coordinates in either pixels or percentage

There’s also an option available to automatically rotate photos, in case you need to change their orientation.

Protect your Images From Unauthorized Use

One of the important aspects when it comes to image optimization for the web regards taking proper protection measures. Ideally you shouldn’t have to take this step, since no one should steal your original content, but the online environment is far from being ideal.

One of the ways you can protect your photos from being stolen is to add a watermark to them. You can use a copyright symbol followed by your name, company name or website or you can use a logo. Both the text and logo can be customized to your individual preferences, which means you can choose where to position them, to rotate and scale them, to adjust the transparency or apply special text effects like stroke, shadow and bounding box.

Convert to the Suitable File Format

Equally important as the previously mentioned operations is to establish the right file type for your pictures. There are multiple formats available, but at the end of the day you’ll probably choose one of the two most popular ones: JPEG and PNG.

JPEG. This is one of the most widely-used file formats, optimal for standard still photographs that are being uploaded to a website. JPEG images have a lossy compression and don’t offer transparency support. On the plus side, they have a smaller file size.

PNG. This one is a lossless format, which means it provides a higher quality of the image in comparison to JPEG. It also supports partial and full transparency, but the downside is that it comes with a larger file size.

Basically you can use both of them, it merely depends on your needs. JPEG is optimal for photography, so if you need to upload pictures taken with your camera this is the right file type. On the other hand, if we’re talking about design work, infographics, logos or photos filled with text, PNG is the ideal format.

If you need to convert images from one format to another, BatchPhoto can help you do it as quick as possible. The tool provides support for more than 170 image formats. These include popular ones, such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF or BMP, as well RAW files from almost all digital cameras.

Rename Images to Boost SEO

This is one of the aspects that can be truly beneficial, but unfortunately is many times neglected. Giving your photos a proper name like the title of a blog post, the name of a product or something else that’s meaningful instead of “DSC04321.jpg” can help you not only better manage your files, but also improve your SEO.

Speaking of SEO, equally important as renaming your images is to insert the alt tags. Alt tags, also known as alternative text, aren’t visible to the visitors of your website, but they help search engines determine what that picture is about. For instance, if you’re an online store that sells tennis shoes and add the appropriate alternative text to your product photos, you increase your chances of a better ranking in the search engines.

You can use BatchPhoto to effectively change the name of your files. The app is designed to rename multiple photos at the same time with absolutely no quality loss whatsoever. You can rename pictures in three ways: with your own custom text, to the folder’s name or the photos’ date. Once you’re done with the editing process, the tool allows you to save the new images on your PC or Mac or directly upload them to a FTP server, to Facebook or Flickr.

As a conclusion, it’s truly important to optimize images for web. This is a process that can help you create high quality images for your visitors, improve the loading speed of your pages and hence provide a pleasant user experience. As a result, this will allow you to obtain a better position in search rankings.